Technology companies are rushing to fund AI infrastructure, and Wall Street is cashing in on the frenzy through dealmaking, capital raising and loans. The banks are collecting the fees. The people at the bottom get the volatility, the inflated valuations and the bill for a boom that keeps demanding more money, more debt and more control over the future.
Who Gets Paid First
Investment banks have reaped strong fees from AI-related deals, including SK Hynix's $26.5 billion ADR offering and SpaceX's record $86 billion initial public offering, as well as debt issuance. That’s the basic arrangement: the firms that already sit closest to capital get rewarded for moving even more capital around. The machinery of finance doesn’t build anything for ordinary people unless profit can be extracted from it.
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said during an earnings call that "The build-out of AI infrastructure remains in its early stages, and we believe this multi-year investment cycle will continue to drive elevated levels of strategic activity, financing, and capital formation across markets." Solomon added that the industry "is in the middle of an AI capex super cycle" where there are demands to utilize every single financing instrument. The language is polished, but the meaning is plain enough. Every financing instrument. Every channel. Every lever.
Goldman Sachs was the lead left underwriter on the SpaceX IPO, and is also poised to play a major role alongside Morgan Stanley in the upcoming listing of Anthropic, as investors seek exposure to the AI boom. Rival OpenAI has also filed for a U.S. IPO. The same pattern keeps repeating: private firms chase public money, banks stand ready to package it, and the market turns a technological race into a fee-generating machine.
Who Carries the Risk
July has been rough for technology stocks, especially microchip makers, as investors wrestle with high valuations and question the longevity of the AI capex boom. That’s the other side of the celebration. When the numbers wobble, the risk doesn’t stay with the bankers who took their cut. It spreads outward through the market, through workers, through anyone tied to the fallout of speculative expansion dressed up as progress.
Citigroup, which was a joint global co-ordinator on the SK Hynix sale, earned over $70 million from the deal. Citi CEO Jane Fraser told investors on its conference call that AI was "dominating a lot of the conversation" with spending on technology, data centers, energy and defense accelerating. The conversation may dominate boardrooms, but the costs land elsewhere, in the infrastructure, the energy use and the financing structures built to keep the cycle moving.
Bank of America recently extended a $520 million credit line to OpenAI, its first loan to the AI company, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said on a conference call, "Overall, the U.S. economy has proved more durable than expected, supported by the strong consumer, ongoing AI-driven investments across the board and easing energy costs, though inflation and tighter monetary policy remain key risks." Durable for whom, exactly, isn’t answered in the quote. The strong consumer and the AI-driven investments get the praise. Inflation and tighter monetary policy get the warning label.
What the Banks Call Growth
Bank of America has helped raise nearly $500 billion for AI-related companies since 2025, accounting for 60% of such fundraising across investment-grade debt, leveraged finance and equity capital markets, according to internal data seen by Reuters. That’s not a side hustle. It’s a pipeline. A huge one. Stephen Biggar, director of financial services research at Argus Research, said, "The AI-driven capex super cycle has benefited equity issuance, M&A activity and debt financing." In other words, the same cycle that concentrates power in a few corporate hands also feeds the fees, the loans and the mergers that tighten the grip.
Larger rival JPMorgan Chase has also been involved with AI-related companies on fundraising and is financing data centers. Meta Platforms is working with Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase on a roughly $13 billion financing package for a data center in El Paso, Texas, Reuters reported in May, citing a source familiar with the matter. The scale is enormous, and the structure is familiar: giant firms, giant banks, giant projects, and ordinary people left to absorb the consequences when the math stops looking magical.
JPMorgan Chief Financial Officer Jeremy Barnum said the firm is seeing decent capital expenditure and loan demand from companies that may not be AI-related, but have an indirect link. He said, "It's like the comments about data centers wind up creating a lot of demand for plumbers and electricians, so you wind up seeing it in sort of slightly non-obvious places." Barnum added that it was hard to say if such demand was AI-related. Even here, the language circles around the real point. The boom reaches into labor markets, but only as an aftereffect of decisions made far above them, in rooms where the people doing the work never get a seat.